Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This is where Senna's story shifts, turns, like a skein waiting to ravel. In 1998, when Senna
was born, Peru was, for all its rich history, an emerging chrysalis—a nation that had swung
violently between democracy and dictatorship for 174 years under the rule of nearly 100
presidents. Three years later, as the country crawled out from under its long decade of civil
war—when Juan Ochochoque was still a robust, fully functional miner in La Rinconada—19
Arab terrorists who had pledged their lives to al-Qaeda flew airplanes into American land-
marks and, paradoxically, Juan's future began to brighten: the value of gold began to grow.
But months later, that bullish trajectory would halt altogether for Juan. The shaft in which he
was working collapsed. Just as in days of yore, when the glacier had sent torrents of water
down the ancient tunnels, a plummeting mass of ice now crushed the mine's delicate cor-
ridors and trapped the workers inside. Juan, who had been pounding a wall of stone, along
with his six-year-old son, Jhon, who had been sweeping out the gravel, were caught in a sud-
den, airless black.
When father and son eventually clawed their way to freedom, they thanked the mountain
godfortheirlives,buttheysoonfoundtheyhadn'tescapedentirely.Theboywasplaguedby
a sickness of the spirit the Indians call
susto:
he ducked at the slightest sound, could hardly
eat or sleep; he was deeply traumatized. Juan, on the other hand, was suffering a very mani-
festphysicaldeterioration.Hislegsballoonedtothreetimestheirnormalsize.Hisarmsgrew
weak.Hisjointsached,handsshook;hecouldscarcelybendhisknees.Beforelong,hebegan
to have seizures; and then came the constant, bone-rattling cough. He couldn't walk more
than a few yards, much less climb the path to the mine.
In the course of a fleeting moment, Juan Ochochoque had become a marginal citizen. He
had joined the women, the children, the maimed and dispossessed—those relegated to distaff
roles in a full-blooded macho society.He was too sick to dowomen'swork:
quimbaleteo
,for
instance, which requires one to stand on a boulder and rock back and forth, grinding ore with
mercury; or
pallaqueo
, in which a woman crawls up a cliff, scavenging for rock that spills
from the mouths of mines, stuffing anything that shines into a backbreaking rucksack. Nor
couldhedoeventhesimplestwork:the
chichiqueo
,whichrequiresawomanorchildtobend
over crushed gravel in standing water for hours, picking through stones in hopes of finding a
gold fleck. These were impossible tasks in his condition. But he had to do something: there
were bills to pay, mouths to feed. In time, he decided to cook for a living. Hunched over an
ethyl alcohol burner on the bare earth of his hut, he produced pot after pot of soups, spaghet-
tis, stews, and sent his family out into the streets to sell them. At night, he drank whatever
alcohol was left, to dull the pain of humiliation.
The labors of Juan's children, which until then had been sporadic and secondary, now be-
cameindispensable,primary.Hiswife,Leonor,andeldestdaughter,Mariluz,dedicatedthem-
selves to the
pallaqueo
, scaling escarpments with hundreds of women who worked their way
